this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
8 points (100.0% liked)

Hacker News

5085 readers
304 users here now

Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.

The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.

Source of the RSS Bot

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
patrick@lemmy.bestiver.se
rssbot@lemmy.bestiver.se
8
How many of the 170k English words do you know? (vocabowl-870366514258.us-west1.run.app)
submitted 1 week ago by rssbot@lemmy.bestiver.se to c/hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
9 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] CuriousRefugee@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Fascinating! As a native speaker, I got 89/100 ("you know 72,000 words"), but perfect on the core and intermediate levels. There were a few that I knew I'd heard before, but couldn't quite place, and then there were some words that I just got lucky with my experiences, like having recently reread Gulliver's Travels and being asked about "brobdingnagian," which literally comes from that book.

I'm curious what other native speakers get, and how difficult even the lower levels are for those learning English.

[–] kibblebits@quokk.au 3 points 1 week ago
  1. But I feel that a lot of these words, especially towards the end, I would not be able to define if I did not have multiple choice. And some that I did not know at all were easy to guess because I knew many of the root words. And then, some I’m just embarrassed that I missed.
[–] deo@anarchist.nexus 1 points 1 week ago

native english speaker here. 93/100, also just got lucky on a few. Interestingly, i missed the most in the "advanced" section, despite that being the middle tier... I guess weird words stick in my head better? There were a couple i missed where I apparently learned the word via context-clues while reading, but with the total opposite of the true meaning, and just never noticed, lol.

[–] GiantSpoonWielder@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 week ago

Native speaker, I scored 96, something like 75k. There were a few I didn't know but figured out from their parts and the available choices. I missed 3 in grandmaster and one in the previous difficulty.

I'm curious how my score would average out over a few attempts.

There are definitely some deep cuts. Like really niche jargon and archaic words.